For thise interested in Murakami's contemporaries, Banana Yoshimoto is an interesting case. I've only read one of her works, Kitchen, but the similarity is almo

For thise interested in Murakami's contemporaries, Banana Yoshimoto is an interesting case. I've only read one of her works, Kitchen, but the similarity is almost astonishing. They both cover themes of loss, a strong sense of a mystical undercurrent right underneath everyday life, and independent (but not necessarily rebellious) protagonists -- and, while it may be an artifact of translation, they have similarly uncluttered but lively prose. She came a bit after he did, in the late 80s, so maybe he influenced her. In Chinese, Ge Fei's Invisibility Cloak -- while a much more recent work -- also comes to mind, although there's something harder and less dreamy about it. Invisibility Cloak is about a niche audio technician and hobbyist who gets involved with a strange underworld customer, and I'll leave it at that :) If you like Murakami and want to dip a toe into "deeper" (or at least more prestigious and less popular) Japanese fiction, Kenzaburo Oe (Changeling, A Personal Matter) is a good starting point. If you want to go darker, a little more unhinged, and on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask) is also good. If you want to go even further back, Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters is an oddly enjoyable story of adult sisters and their shifting relationships -- if Proust is like a jungle, alive and profligate and almost obscenely lush, then Tanizaki is more like fresh-cut wood, clean and with a certain reserve and neutrality, but still alive. I find Yasunari Kawabata the least accessible of all these writers, but he seems to be held in high esteem in Japan. His Snow Country is I'm guessing making references to things I don't understand, but it's at least pleasant to read, and the ending is (I'm told, and at least kind of feel, but not with any sophistication) a very nice example of ma, which Wikipedia tells me roughly means negative space. Finally, to end an overlong post, I first heard of most of these things in Brian Phillips' excellent longform article connecting modern Japanese sumo, older Japanese literature, and Yukio Mishima's very strange attempted coup/suicide: http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/ http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hak...